5. In ancient Greece not voting made you a “marked man” (failing to attending to your civic duties in the assembly could get citizens rounded up using a red-painted rope, leaving them marked men).

6. That reminds me... the original, ancient Greek, meaning of “idiot” was the antonym of the original meaning of “political” (see The Most Successful Euphemism In History). Now they seem like near synonyms.

7. Speaking of the way words are used in politics, Mary Beard says democracy suffers when “words lose all meaning… Politicians may always have lied, but at least the Greeks and Romans worried about that. We have come almost to take it for granted.”

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